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Tag Archives: 9 ball

My VP4 9 ball career was corrupted by a crash, meaning I had to delete it and start again, so make sure you backup your career files. 3000+ racks down the drain.

After the crash I went back on to VP4 to carry on where I left off and noticed none of the competitions had been played – (I was on the last tournament of the season so thought it might have just ended the season) – then I noticed it was the local tour. I tried to play the local tour – but instead of 9 ball the table loaded with fifteen 8 balls and then crashed rendering the career unplayable.

However, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case, it means I can start my stats again from a slightly better starting position. I managed to go 6 matches with 100% pot success on the money ball – the shot I finally missed was when I didn’t have a shot at all after the CO missed an

Due to the crash I’m back on the Local Tour. I could’ve tried to qualify straight for the national tour but decided to boost my confidence on the big pockets of the earlier tables against poorer opposition.

This was recorded around a week and a half ago and is a race to 9 vs my good friend Mal which he won 9-8 giving me a 6 rack head start. Mal is an excellent pool player in both real life and on VP4 and runs his own pool blog over at runout.tv.

I find video to be a great practice tool as quite often what you feel you are doing is nothing like what you are actually doing.

This video has taught me two things, I’m not as bad as I thought (once I got used to playing on camera and got my eye in), and, that I have a little bit of head movement – up and down as I cue backwards and forwards – which I need to quieten down.

Well, I managed to retain my place on the National Tour for the first time with a 42nd place finish, it doesn’t sound great, but it’s a step in the right direction and all of my stats are improving – especially money making % and run out from break %.

I’ve become a “yo yo” player on the National Tour. I get promoted to the National Tour before being relegated straight back to the Regional tour, gaining promotion straight back before being relegated again.

My potting has become better, the stats here won’t show it as most of this season was played intermittently, a few frames here and there – with a couple of weeks break in between, so I never really had time to get my eye in.

I played an hour or so tonight and have been practicing in a Straight Pool career and have managed a couple of runs of 18, so things are looking up.

So, here are the stats and Results for Season 6

Results

Stats

Compared to last season:

Ball making average down 0.003 to 0.630

Breaks made a ball down 0.2 to 60.5%

Average balls on break remained at 0.9

Run outs from break remained at 5.5%

Break money made down 0.1 to 4.4%

Balls per turn remained at 1.3

Money making % down 0.4 to 72.5%

Overall, I’ve gotten worse, I’m putting this down to a long lay off between games (2 weeks or so without playing any VP4 or pool).

I’m looking forward to it, no doubt England will be knocked out in the quarter / semi finals but a month solid of football on TV will be enjoyable – it’s a shame I’m going to have to watch the games on mute… a month of those vuvenzelas (South African horns) blasting through the TV is enough to drive anyone mad.

I’ve even booked Friday off work so that I can watch the opening ceremony to get the World Cup started properly.

Looks like I’m going to be heading down to Riley’s in the morning for a couple of hours of 9 ball and maybe even some snooker before heading home to get comfy and watch the World Cup unfold.

My pool game’s coming on nicely. I’m now making runs of 4-5 balls fairly often, with a high of 8 balls but that elusive full rack is still proving to be a challenge – it’ll come soon though – that’s for sure.